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At the opening of Fathema Bemath’s exhibition at the Origin Art Gallery, Gordon Froud, the lecturer, sculptor and gallerist, remarked that the term “emerging artist” is often used in reference to young practitioners, forgetting that the circumstances under which one “emerges” can be unique, rendering the expression woefully unspecific.
For Bemath, who has kept a base at August House’s End Street Studios since August 2020 and has run a dental laboratory for close to 30 years, her relatively late entrance as an artist is so closely tied to the social mores surrounding her upbringing as a Muslim woman that it has informed her work quite definitively. Using clay and sometimes bark, Bemath makes art that reflects and comments on the historic representation of black women through the male gaze. She started sculpting during the hard lockdown of March 2020. “My lab had to close for three weeks and I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve got a chance because I’ve always had to put these things on hold,’” she says from her small studio a few days before the show’s opening.
Although her interpretive voice is yet to break, Bemath’s engagement with her chosen medium is immediately striking. Her busts are usually made of fired clay. They are individually distinct. Sometimes they appear fragile or fractured. Some are marked by linear scars and other imprints like the faint remnants of newspaper text as a result of her collaging cuttings with resin. Some years prior to her decision to turn to sculpture, Bemath worked on a piece with the late artist Benon Lutaaya, a sometime-collagist who incorporated newspaper pages into his art. He was based at August House at the time. This occasional feature in her work is a fitting ode. At the opening, Froud dubbed her a material fetishist who derives much enjoyment from the material itself and finds ways to engage it in a deeper fashion.
This depth to her practice connects to her interest in how women have been represented by men. “What you (would) find in museums, particularly, is women presented as the Virgin Mary or the whore,” says Bemath.
In an interview as part of the Meta Foundation’s Meet The Artist series (on artists working from August House), Bemath referenced the research stats that the Guerilla Girls posterised in 1989, to the effect that “less than five percent of modern artists shown there [at the Met. Museum were women while more than 85 percent of the museum’s nudes were female.”
The disparity suggested by those numbers is mirrored to some degree by the demographics at August House, the downtown building which houses 44 artist studios. Bemath is one of five women who make art here. The causes for the imbalances are layered, but Bemath, Antoinette McMaster and Olwethu de Vos have responded with a fearless approach conducive to exponential growth. Much like her work, which can be both bold and tentative, there are shrewd aspects to Bemath’s practice, as much as there is caution. “I’m 50. I’m hungry. I don't have 20 years to develop a career,” she says. “If I want this, I’ve got to make this happen now, like within the next ten years. I don’t regret that I started late. Life plays its course. Being older gives me a level of insight I wouldn't have had when I was younger. I’ve got business acumen. I know how to run a practice as a business owner.”
Besides the two-hander with Frans Thoka at Orgin Art, Bemath’s work also appeared at the Nirox Sculpture Park in September and she made the top 20 at 2021’s Thami Mnyele Fine Art Awards.
De Vos, who has returned to art making after a few years of curating, tells me from her spacious south-wing fourth-floor studio that her preference for high-relief works can be read as a preparation for a return to three-dimensional sculpture. A presence at August House since 2017 when she won the Teresa Lizamore Curatorial Mentorship Programme, presented in conjunction with August House and Rand Merchant Bank, De Vos found that her studio (initially she took a much smaller space) became more of an office because of her focus. “I was having a difficult transition in terms of what I could afford to do,” she says. “So I was working with other artists and putting shows together for them.”
At some point, De Vos was invited to an all-woman group show at MM Arthouse in Blairgowrie. She challenged herself to make drawings. “At the time I was working with the theme of gender-based violence and I wanted to present male nudes in a vulnerable way,” De Vos says. “I wanted to make a statement that domestic abuse is also something that women perpetuate too because a lot of this starts from (behaviour) we learn at home.” But because she was still drawn to working with glass, she had a lot of copper wire lying around, as it is a material that can withstand the heat of glass. “I was curious about what would happen if I used staples instead of just using copper on the [masonite] board,” she says. “Over time I kept pushing the boundary of what one can do with the materials. It became my signature style.”
De Vos works in these clearly defined series, in which the tactility of the disparate elements is seemingly transmuted through narrative coherence. “When you see the staples and copper as raw materials, you see them as something manly, hardcore and laborious,” she says. “Once you capture the flow of materials, it changes how one views them, while still keeping their value.”
For a series titled Puberty, in which she uses a recurring motif of uterine shapes to explore the paths to womanhood, she stretched the possibilities of her materials even further, introducing other hardware associated with prescribed domestic roles.
De Vos’s predilection for visceral expression is a product of her University of Pretoria education, where there was a focus on materiality, she says. The organic evolution of her practice, though, reveals her strong will to stay true to what she wants to do. “I feel like I’ve witnessed a lot of artists succumbing to changing their artistic direction to create things that are on trend and are selling,” she tells me.
Arguably, her experience as a curator has helped her reverse engineer her career. “When you witness other professional artists working it influences your conduct,” she says. “And the business is cutthroat. It’s always better to have mentors that you feel comfortable to consult.”
McMaster also has an interest in highlighting domestic abuse but she favours costuming, photography (sometimes in evocatively-designed installations) and performance. “I look at the costumes as referring to hidden abuse,” she says. “But there are always glimpses that come through.”
In Sticks and stones will break my bones But words can also kill me she delves into the psychological dimension of abuse and the perversion of intimacy. The work, McMaster says, was inspired by lockdown and formed part of her final practicals for her honours degree at Unisa, where she studied fine art. She is set to graduate this year.
This work typifies McMaster’s open-ended approach to making work. It is often collaborative and sometimes involves intense performance. Based in the East Rand and juggling artmaking with homemaking and a career in the accounting field, McMaster works from home but sometimes works from her studio in August House so as to be in communion with other artists.
When I visit, large digital prints of her other series Not Quite Hidden line one side of her tiny studio. In it, costumed models with large, petal-like, or feathery masks fashioned out of fabric are framed by smoky backgrounds and minimal shrubbery. From the series one gets a sense of McMaster’s exquisite sense of presentation. There is an abiding didacticism, however, when her complete oeuvre is considered, you are struck by her broad artistic range and her eye for abstract textures in her photography. There’s a restless spirit in McMaster in which one senses that she has resisted efforts to pigeonhole her as she hones her voice. Her last relationship with a gallery was short-lived because “I didn’t think my work suited the gallery,” she says. She prefers to work in the realm of “conversation starters” as opposed to “pretty pictures”, although she realises that she has enough dexterity to blur the two. A few people have shown interest in her art until “they hear the stories behind it and they say it’s too depressing and they don’t want the work in their house, which to me is quite telling.”
There’s a palpable joy in her voice when she mentions that her work is gathering interest overseas, sending me a link to mosi-o-tunya.org. Her upcoming series, a look at the environmental damage caused by fast fashion, is one that widens the subject matter of her art even further, featuring costumes from synthetic waste and natural material.
While all three artists can lay claim to a sense of community at August House, due to various circumstances, such as balancing other careers and the demands of family, they all interact in the space differently. On the challenges to attracting more women to August House, Meta Foundation director Sara Hallatt, who undertakes the marketing and programming of the studios, says that some of the concerns about interacting with the inner city are perception-based and others are indeed legitimate. “We did have a lot more women artists and lost some of those during Covid. We have been striving to find ways to bolster our woman population here. We do this through our Women to Watch Award, which runs annually. And our studio exchange programme will focus on a woman artist and one from the LBTQI community. This would be free studio rental for a year.” Hallatt says the Open Studios initiative, which takes place on October 30 this year, also serves as an outreach project to women artists. – Sosibo is participating in a Writer’s Residency at August House facilitated by the African Art Content Agency, a non-commercial art journalism project.
· Open Studios takes place on Sunday, October 30th from 10.30 until 4pm. Tickets are R30 online or R50 at the door. The programme includes meeting 40 artists, a screen printing demonstration, a kids area and food and drinks will be on sale. A shuttle service ferries guests from Access City. Tickets can be purchased through Quicket. Visit www.augusthouse.co.za for more information.
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